The UK’s Department for International Development (DFID) has given the Punjab government about £63m for education since 2009, as part of a grant that will eventually total £77m, The Telegraph reported.
Critics believe the foreign cash has made it easier for Punjab’s leaders to raid their own education budget to buy votes ahead of a general election expected early next year.
So far they have spent about £26m on 100,000 free computers – and have promised to distribute another 300,000, worth a further £78m.
Imran Khan, the former Pakistani cricket captain and a contender to be the country’s next president, said the laptops were a political gimmick.
“Time and again aid is a curse for Third World countries,” he said. “It stops us making reforms. Rather than forcing the government to balance their budgets, in this case it is being used in election year to buy votes.”
British aid officials insist that their cash is carefully monitored and is not being spent on laptops.
The controversy illustrates the fraught nature of giving aid to Pakistan. The country has one of the lowest rates of tax collection in the world – at about 10 per cent of gross domestic product, compared with about 29 per cent for the UK – yet spends billions of dollars on a growing nuclear arsenal while collecting billions more in aid from donors.
Despite concerns about corruption, the country is to become the biggest recipient of British aid by 2015 – receiving £446m in 2015.
The links are so tight that DFID has even installed Sir Michael Barber, former head of Tony Blair’s Downing Street “delivery unit”, as education adviser to Shahbaz Sharif, Punjab’s chief minister.
At the same time, the laptop giveaway is hugely controversial in Pakistan, a country where 17 million children are not in school and half the adult population is illiterate.
Shahbaz Sharif, the chief minister of Punjab, is accused of bribing the electorate ahead of elections expected next year when his brother, Nawaz, will be one of the candidates for prime minister. Some enterprising students have put their computers up for sale on the internet or sold them to electrical stores, while education experts say Punjab should be spending its money on classrooms or blackboards.
Professor Pervez Hoodbhoy said a digital giveaway was not the answer to Pakistan’s education crisis,
“The virtues that an education system ought to have – integrity, outreach, basic necessities – those have to be fulfilled before one gets into hi-tech glitzy stuff,” he said.
However, supporters of the programme dismiss allegations of corruption.
They say laptops are only distributed to those who meet stringent criteria based on exam results and that each computer benefits an entire family not just an individual.
Mian Naseer, who sits in the Punjab Assembly for the PML-N party of Nawaz Sharif, said the criticism was motivated by political jealousy. Only students who hit exam targets were being given computers, he said.
“There is no corruption,” he said. “This is something that should be done and should be done all over Pakistan.”
A DFID spokesman said British cash was being used to fund stipends for girls so they can afford to go to school and being put towards low-cost schooling for the poorest.
“UK funding is not substituting Government of Punjab spend on education,” he said. “In fact, the Government of Punjab has actually increased the amount it spends on education by around 13 per cent this year, thanks in large part to the work it has been doing with DFID.”
